With the continuing growth of international commerce and travel, there has been a corresponding increase in the demand for translation services, for example, to accommodate business communications between parties who use different languages. This demand has led to the development of a plethora of text translation software, including, for example, the web-based text translation services provided by GOOGLE, as well as BABELFISH by ALTAVISTA.
Many speech-to-text software engines have likewise been produced. These include DRAGON NATURALLY SPEAKING, IBM'S VIA VOICE, and LERNOUT & HAUSPIE'S PROFESSIONAL EDITION. However, existing speech-to-text engines are generally single-language only. That is, speech in one language is only converted to text in the same language, and a different version of such engine may be provided for each of various different languages. In addition, speech recognition algorithms used by various software products are proprietary. Therefore, a user must train each such software program to recognize his/her voice.
In addition, there exist many text-to-speech engines in which text is converted to computer-generated speech. One example of this is NATURAL VOICES by AT&T CORP. Most such text-to-speech engines are also single-language only, where different versions may exist for different languages.
While each of these types of components can be used to readily convert various communications from speech to text, or text from one language into text of another, to date, there has been no successful commercial implementation of an end-to-end system in which speech from one language can be readily converted to speech in another, and particularly where such conversion can be accomplished and presented in real-time or near real-time.